


banbū

by seeyouinthefog



Series: Neither Never nor Ever, Goodbye [1]
Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Dark Fantasy, F/M, Grief, Horror, PTSD, Survival Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:47:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28476408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seeyouinthefog/pseuds/seeyouinthefog
Summary: The first tear opens over Kagawa, Japan.
Relationships: Adam Francis/Rin Yamaoka | The Spirit
Series: Neither Never nor Ever, Goodbye [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085765
Kudos: 14





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: Child abuse, domestic abuse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: domestic abuse, child abuse.

"Although the wind  
blows terribly here,  
the moonlight also leaks  
between the roof planks  
of this ruined house."  
\- Izumi Shikibu, "Although the wind..."

* * *

The sky cracks like an egg the first time the world ends. Filament-thin rimations crushed into being, each new one branching from the last. Black and smoking. Stink of sulfur like brimstone. When she slips through, the sun is setting and the clouds are purple, swollen, like her mother's eye socket, like her own once-busted lip. She is a child again, cowering by a cherry tree; she is a woman, lying in glass; she is a shadow of herself, falling to the Earth.

She thinks, "Now I will die," and, each time, the tremor of impact rattles her to blackness.

* * *

She had an ancestor who climbed out of the sea. He had escaped one wreck and landed in another, had taken up a sword and carved a home from the bodies of the men who had come before him. He didn't know that blood makes for a slippery foundation, that centuries down the line, a girl would harvest what he had sown.

Or, maybe, she's wrong. Maybe sins aren't passed down the line. Maybe everything that ever happens is without reason, and there is no single man to be blamed for a wicked crop.

It doesn't matter. Either way, she is there, lying in a patch of dirt, surrounded by a forest of bamboo. Tall as she has ever seen. Hard green against the waning light and blackened sky. A stormcloud—no, a fissure, a split in the heavens that feeds into an abyss. It crackles like breaking ice, and she knows the sound, felt it for an age scratching at the bottom of her brain. It was a language that she couldn't speak but still, somehow, made her rage and ache. It tugged her along when she didn't want to hurt, to do the hurting.

From where? Who spoke it? She can't remember, but it's cold outside and the soil is damp, smelling of a recent rain. She wants to sit up, but can only turn her head.

When she was a child, her father had beaten her mother until the woman had spat up blood and teeth. He'd broken her wrist and left her lying limp on the kitchen floor for his daughter to find. Her mother had collected herself as she always did, as if nothing worthy of mention had happened at all. She'd made a splint and washed her face in the sink. She'd packed a picnic basket and said, "We're going on a trip."

How many hours had they driven to get to Arashiyama, Rin in the back seat, crying, then silent? How long had they walked in the bamboo grove, until her knees had ached and, finally, her mother had cried?

Does it matter? Is there anyone else left alive to remember?

Her mother had smelled like expensive French perfume her father had bought in fleeting apology. Her mother had been warm to the touch and so soft in how she held her, that Rin had once believed no ache could ever last. Her mother is dead and she's never coming back.

Rin knows this, feels it in her bones that she can breathe and _breathe_ and reach out, but she will never smell her or touch her again. She will never hear her or see her or run away with her into some great, green unknown.

She wants to rip herself open and claw out her insides. She wants tear her hair and rend her clothes and scream until she dies. Because, listen: this is not the kind of pain you can live with, it is not the kind of grief you can balm or bury or put aside. Every memory she has, her mother is. Everywhere she turns, her mother is not.

It's only when she starts to sob that her limbs remember themselves. Familiar sensation of nothing quite fitting together. Breeze whistling between her hip and waist, her fingers and hand, all the pieces of her that share a gravity but never quite connect. She flexes a stray finger and cries harder. She remembers, now, the static and the black and the fog. She remembers her mother, bled out on the floor, and she thinks no, god, this is not the kind of pain you can live with, this is the killing kind.


	2. ii.

Timber shingles and a strange thought as he strikes them: there are three kinds itabuki, determined by—

Splintering pain and the scream of wood. The second floor is kind enough not to yield but his breath is knocked heavenward upon collision. Shingles fall, tinkling against the floorboards like the rain that has rotted them. He groans and coughs.

Kokusabuki, he thinks, maybe. Maybe not. He can't recall and his skeleton is yowling. Strange, the things we remember in times like these. The things—

_a man, on the beach, looking back at him, smiling_

—we remember.

He shakes his head. He needs to sort himself, to get up and get moving, but his body’s bleating down to the bones and if blood could ache, god, it’s throbbing now. He grits his teeth and rolls over, staring upward. Hole punched through the roof. Pinkish light and mist of rain drifting down through the ruin. It’s cold on his cheeks and he realizes, _it's never shown us a sunset before.  
_

Daylight in facsimile sometimes, yes, at the lodge, in the dusty desert town, but not like this. He raises a hand and the light splits between his fingers. He flexes it and catches nothing.

"I need to get moving," but the floorboards are still and no heartbeats trouble the air, and he is afraid that, if he looks away, he’ll never see the sunlight again. Does It know? When It sets its roots into their skin, does it feel everything they miss?

"It’ll feed you lies," a man named Gus had once told him, not long after he’d awoken there, by the fire, in the forest. "It'll dangle things right in front of you. Things you love, things you need. None of it's real, you hear? Ain't sunlight you saw out the corner of your eye, ain't your mama calling you into the trees. You understand?"

"Sure," he had said, "but I never knew my mother."

He’d never seen Gus again. Wall-eyed old bastard with a graying-blonde beard—they’d gone to a trial and he'd just never returned.

Maybe It had heard him. Maybe It had let him go just to prove him wrong. Adam hadn’t known the man, hadn’t even liked him, but he wishes it so hard that it makes his innards wring. He knows it's not true, but if It can lie, then so can he.

A light wind shakes through the rafters and it's like a warning. He’s caused a ruckus and these things can you hear, can scent you on the air, can see you in the dark. He wrestles himself to his feet through the pain and realizes, only then, that he has no idea where he is. It echoes something almost familiar. A long hallway of cherry wood floors and latticed fusuma. The tang of tatami mats, but must, too. Mildew. Dust. To the north, lies a wide room with peeling walls and a stairwell that unfolds into darkness. 

It does this sometimes—changes things. He wonders if It grows bored, or if a learned realm is one that harvests less fear. He crouches low and inches down the hallway, ears straining against the silence. One by one, he slides open the doors on either side of him and, one by one, he finds nothing at all. Blank space. No furniture, no pallets, no generators. 

In the last room, even the mats have been stripped away, and a dark stain stretches across the floor. It's the size of a person and his stomach swims. When he was young, his uncle's neighbor had hit her head and bled out in her bedroom. Her sons had had to rip up the carpet, the flooring, the concrete beneath, because of how the blood had steeped and stained it.

He doesn't want to think about it.

He tells himself, so many things can leave behind memories.

Nigh on five minutes and he reaches the end of the hall with less answers than when he'd started. The rain has grown earnest, shunting down through the hole he left, and the lowlight is fading. A storm is coming and with it washes in another epiphany: It's never let them see the weather change.

His back throbs and his skulls pounds and he turns towards the stairwell, towards the dark room into which it feeds. Nothing there, either. More emptiness. A vacant tokonoma, a genkan unpopulated by shoes. Cracks in the walls and the cold of a home long starved of life.


	3. iii.

Home is a hole in your chest. It's a cavity in your brain.

It is the pit that births you and the grave that swallows you and the blackness in between.

She feels the hollow of it as she parts the bamboo. Its stone walls and steepled roof both familiar and strange. No light diffuses through the shōji, and the lanterns are grave-cold. Knotweed swallows the paths, the steps, the shed. Vines clutch and climb the walls, burrow through the paper. Wild with the bamboo. All of it, abandoned.

And where she looks for fog, there is none. Instead, the sweep of the grounds. Distant trees and walls. Promise of roads. All the while, a silence in her brain that she had forgotten could even be.

How long has it been? How quickly can a building fall to ruin? How fast do weeds grow?

A rain has begun, first a feather-fine drizzle, now growing in earnest. It tamps down the wild drift of her hair, flattening it against her shoulders and skull. She holds up her hands, studies how, unbound, they still trail her arms.

_What holds her together now?_

The front fusuma skids open, hissing on its track, and she jerks back amidst the greenery. A joke, all of this; a test. She will look up and there her father will be, come again, no matter how many times she kills him. And she’ll do what she must, though, sometimes, he screams and the voice is not his; though, sometimes, his face shudders and melts on the hook and a stranger is looking back at her. She will—

It isn’t him. Not for just a moment, but for second after second. It isn’t him.

On her porch, eyes wildly jerking to and fro, is a man far taller and younger. Black, with dense hair. Vest, tie, slacks, a long overcoat. A robber? No, he’s carrying nothing and makes no move to flee. And even when it was inhabited, they had so little left to take.

She steps back and the bamboo tattles.

"Who’s there?" His head jerks. "Claudette? Dwight?"

She wants to be small. She wants to shrink to a pebble and then beyond, to be lost in the rotting leaves and fallen husks of home and remain forever unfound. Strange the things we forget. A sword in the wrist, a world in The Between.

He takes to the path, one step, then two. Then, his knees bend and he creeps the rest of the way, hands reaching out to part the bamboo.


End file.
